Photo via Mutiny in Heaven - birthdaypartymovie.com
The Birthday Party
The Birthday Party
Nick Cave was the most dangerously Dionysian rock star since Iggy Pop. His performances in early days were as much an assault on audiences as a concert. He first became known outside his native Australia for fronting a band called the Birthday Party. That band is the subject of a new documentary, Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party.
Director Ian White touches briefly on formative childhood influences. Watching “The Johnny Cash Show” on television with his parents, Cave was profoundly struck by the Man in Black, whose music and presentation somehow, sometimes, left him “uncomfortable.” We learn that Cave’s parents were culturally engaged and supported—in general if not in specifics—his creative pursuits. He wanted to paint, music was a side project at first, but with the mates he met at school, and the influence of the newest thing, punk rock, music became dominant.
Cave’s first band, the innocuously monikered Boys Next Door, included the nucleus of what became the Birthday Party. Although never as well-known outside Australia as the Saints or Radio Birdman, Boys Next Door worked the island continent playing at least two shows a week and becoming central to the Melbourne scene. By the evidence of the scratchy videos and home movies White unearthed, they were besotted by the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks.
Already sullen and sinister in countenance, Cave flailed madly as the band tried to break the limits. Those limits included recklessness off stage, petty crime and the lure of heroin, penny cheap and fresh from Asian shores. By the time they arrived in London, reinvented as the Birthday Party, they were trapped in a debilitating cycle of high and low, descending from the cool heights into the dark valley for lack of drug money. At first, the whole band lived in a one-room bed set—with their girlfriends.
Mutiny in Heaven shows that the Birthday Party were a group, not a backing band, a collaboration with bassist Tracy Pew and guitarist Rowland Howard as essential to the sound as Cave’s vocals. New interviews with band members, often as voiceovers, accompany the parade of still photos, archival interviews and videos that thrust the viewers into performances and usher us into the recording studio. All bandmembers agree that their first year in the U.K. was rough, having landed in that music mecca only to find that punk had receded, replaced by Adam Ant.
The Birthday Party proffered music of druggy and impoverished desperation, rage and contempt for mainstream norms as well as the commodified alternatives. Their shows went beyond confrontation and into violence. They did nothing to make themselves commercial or even likeable in any normal sense, yet they began to pack houses on several continents and drew ever increasing numbers.
Even at their most chaotic, an inkling of intelligence could be sensed. One story in Mutiny in Heaven concerns Pew stuffing a cucumber down the front of his trousers—and visible in his back pocket, a copy of Plato’s Republic. The demonically bizarre video for “Prayers on Fire” was patterned after the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
They “took it all too far,” to quote David Bowie, an early inspiration, and conflict began to spoil the Birthday Party. Drummer Phill Calvert was unceremoniously kicked out and Howard increasingly diverged with Cave over their songwriting. Already (perhaps always?), Cave was in search for the meaning behind the apparent chaos of reality. With his poetic voice becoming as distinct as his dramatic vocals, he began to distill his anger and alienation into a more polished coherence, audible on his post-Birthday Party albums with the Bad Seeds.
Mutiny in Heaven screens Sept. 22 at the Oriental Theatre.
